ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI Pulitzer Arts Foundation While “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work” did not present her life experience idealistically, her creative, ethical response to her experience and her tenacious devotion to labor became almost transcendent models of work-arounds for obstruction.
Observant By Nature: A Conversation with Malia Jensen
Malia Jensen’s work combines a keen sense of observation of the natural world with a complex sense of humor. Earthy, sensual, uncanny, ambiguous, and provocative, her sculptures are always more than what they appear to be, teasing out multi-layered narratives.
Francis Upritchard
LONDON Barbican Centre Referencing an Iron Age burial site in the north of England, Francis Upritchard’s impressive exhibition, “Wetwang Slack,” announced from the outset that archaeology would be an underlying theme. But this was no dry, bleached-out display of indistinguishable artifacts such as have tried the patience of school children for generations.
Rachel Lee Hovnanian’s Secrets
Raised in Texas, New York artist Rachel Lee Hovnanian has long explored narcissism, perfection, beauty, and addiction. Her first solo museum exhibition, “Open Secrets,” curated by Annalisa Bugliani, presents work from the last 12 years. The show remains on view in the 16th-century Palazzo Mediceo in Seravezza, Italy, through September 15, 2019.
Roni Horn: Great Doubts
The thing that’s so appealing about “the sublime” is that it’s indefinable and without boundaries. All markers are missing; there are no indicators, no specificities, no fixed framework in which to embed meaning. Instead, there is awe and universality, consisting entirely of experience and sensation culminating in metaphor.
Analogies For Life: A Conversation with Risa Puno
“We wanted people to think about the mechanics of games and how that can relate to larger systems.”
Mike Nelson
LONDON Tate Britain The development of sculpture through the 20th century was made possible, in part, by the development of increasingly sophisticated machinery, and The Asset Strippers expounds that interdependent relationship.
Time to Make a Stand: A Conversation with Mel Chin
“All Over the Place,” Mel Chin’s “post-retrospective comprehensive survey” at the Queens Museum (2018) was aptly named. For more than 40 years, he has used a staggering range of materials and processes—plant and soil research, traditional stone sculpture, covert interventions in TV shows, and most recently augmented reality—to address pressing social and environmental issues, from
Mortal Coils: A Conversation with Angela Hennessy
Artist and educator Angela Hennessy lives and works in Oakland, California, where she teaches at California College of the Arts. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice examines mythologies of blackness embedded in linguistic metaphors of color and cloth.
Tara Donovan
DENVER Museum of Contemporary Art Denver Some of the more recent pieces in “Fieldwork,” Donovan’s recent mid-career retrospective, lacked the aesthetic beauty of her early work with translucent materials like plastic cups. Yet the impact of an elephantine installation amassed from gray file cards is thunderous, as powerful as banyan tree roots, mythical monsters, or the mountains of Huangshan.
